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Showing posts from May, 2014

OCR are not towing the line! Lord help us all!

It appears that OCR (an Exam Board operated jointly by Oxford, Cambridge and the RCA) have just announced a new English A-level programme , which has been developed in conjunction with the English Media Centre. Let's just take a moment to consider the level of subject expertise represented by these four groups.... Ok - to continue. According to OCR: The range of texts to be studied is the most diverse yet for any English A Level. It ranges from classics such as the poems of Emily Dickinson and William Blake to memoirs like Twelve Years a Slave and contemporary works including poetry from Jacob Sam-La Rose, Jez Butterworth's stage play Jerusalem, fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Russell Brand's evidence on drugs policy presented to the House of Commons. Personally, I think this all sounds rather exciting.  The texts are certainly diverse, and allow for an interdisciplinarity (combining the study of culture, literature and language in ways which border some a